You Want To Upgrade to iOS4, But Should You Yet?

Hardy Macia, known for PocketMoney and MPG, sent an email today with a warning many of us might be overlooking. Some apps, not yet tuned for iOS4, may not work as they do now on your 3.x OS iPhone.

A lot of developers have updated their apps to run on iOS4, enhancing to use new capabilities brought about by the OS for new features. When a OS is released, not all things remain the same in the background that a developer might be using which means some features will not function. If there is an app that you really depend on everyday, you may want to double check to make sure it has either been updated or at leasted tested on the new OS before you update.

From Hardy’s email today:

PocketMoney for iOS warning:
If you are a PocketMoney for iPhone/iPod Touch user, then please do not upgrade to iOS 4.0 immediately, but wait for PocketMoney 3.0.6 to be approved by Apple before upgrading to iOS 4.0.

There is a serious bug that prevents the custom amount keyboard from displaying with the decimal point button. So if you upgrade to iOS 4.0 you will not be able to enter decimal points — the work around is to copy and paste a decimal point into the amount field.

PocketMoney iPad/iPhone Syncing and PocketMoney for Windows/OS X
The upcoming version 3.1 of PocketMoney will have iOS device to iOS device syncing. It will also be able to sync to the desktop version of PocketMoney that is currently in development. I had pushed for a June 16th release for my birthday, but there were still a couple bugs and some polishing that needs to be done before I feel comfortable releasing it to all of you. I will send another email out when 3.1/Desktop is officially available. I’m really excited for it.

MPG for iOS 4.0 warning:
The same warning applies to MPG users with the decimal point. Version 1.3 has been submitted to Apple and is awaiting approval. It also adds support for the iPad screen size.

Today!
A new app just for iOS 4.0. I’ll be submitting it this week to Apple for review. There are three things that I wished the built in calendar did. 1) Display a badge for the number of appointment I have left today — Messages, Mail, and Phone all show you what you are missing — Today! gives you a quick look at your appointments. 2) Clicking on the location will open Maps to route you to your next appointment. 3) Set the default alarm time for new events you create through Today!, and 4) Lists your appointments so you can see the location and notes.

iTunes 9.2 Update is all about iOS4

Tunes 9.2 comes with several new features and improvements, including:
– Bullets are Apple’s comments on this release followed by a quick analysis of what it may mean to us.

• Sync with iPhone 4 to enjoy your favorite music, movies, TV shows, books and more on-the-go
– General sync updates, we’re hoping for the file sync/transfer through the iTunes USB conduit like we have with our iPads.

• Sync and read books with iPhone or iPod touch with iOS 4 and iBooks 1.1
– Yes, iBooks comes to the iPhone. We hope the library grows a lot, it has had a slow start. With the super screen on the iPhone 4, book text should be readable even on this smaller screen (compared to iBooks on the iPad).

• Organize and sync PDF documents as books. Read PDFs with iBooks 1.1 on iPad and any iPhone or iPod touch with iOS 4
– Reading PDFs in iBooks will be a nice feature. This wont mean an end of the many PDF reader and notation apps currently available. The bookshelf layout of iBooks is nice, for large quantities of PDFs we will need tagging to better organize what is work and what is fun.

• Organize your apps on your iOS 4 home screens into folders using iTunes
– YEA! Folders of apps that you can assemble in the luxury of your desktop/notebook. Very nice! We have already been grouping our apps into ones that tie together for a process.

• Faster back-ups while syncing an iPhone or iPod touch with iOS 4
– We can always use faster syncs. We aren’t sure if this is better management of which files get backed up so time isn’t spent backing everything up if it hasn’t changed or the data is assembled differently. More to follow…

• Album artwork improvements make artwork appear more quickly when exploring your library
– Album artwork is a mixed bag of good and bad. We cut our albums down to just the songs we are interested in keeping on our mobiles. So, we end up with image file after image file that is only associated to one or two songs. Sure looks cool though!

For information on the security content of this update, please visit: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1222

Some work appears to have been done on the general iTunes UI too. Buttons are a bit less vibrant if they aren’t usable. Quantity of items in a folder like Apps and Podcasts that need your attention pop a bit more.

It appears that iBooks are still not available for searching and purchasing anywhere except through the app on the iPhone/iPad.

Customizing Your iPhone 4 Is Already Available

You know I love to ‘skin’ my iPhone and my Macbook Pro. The folks at Unique Skins are feeding my need. No sooner do I get my iPhone 4 ordered, they posted up the availability to make custom skins. They have all the opening for both cameras and the flash.

I tossed up an image for my wife’s phone and one for mine. You can guess from below which is which. She went with the new White version… or rather, will be when they are for sale. Upload an image that matches the statement you want to make. Not only will they see you have the latest iPhone but also that you have already made it yours.

The skins that you make with your own picture or one of theirs is less than $7.00 that cover botht the front and back. At that price, you can have a different statement ever couple weeks.

Getting Back To The Basics To Get More

As we buzzed down the highway last week, we thought of a couple restaurants we might want to hit after the long day at the office. There are many apps to choose from to assist in finding the one we thought of but was forgetting the name. The apps can show us other people’s favorites, spots people have tag’d every they visited, national publication suggestions, etc… we love having so many options. We ended up using the built in Google Map’s search and it showed us the spots ahead of us on the highway that closely matched. The quick and simple answer was what we needed.

Last week, a app I use a lot everyday was updated. Twittelator Pro has proven to do what I need it to do when I am looking for posts from friends, searching for news and wish to spread my words out to the masses. There are many Twitter apps for the iPhone and a lot of those have been updated since the introduction of the iPad.

Here is a couple screen shots from the ‘old’ version of Twittelator Pro:

and now a couple shots I took of the same posts in Twitter after installing the latest version:

Obviously, it has been updated for OS 4.0 and a bunch of other fine things. Actually, you have to look under the covers to find the updates. The updates are mostly around making it easier to fine tune all the features you may use. The feature list for Twittelator Pro is silly long. I use only a tiny slice of the options, there is something there for any user.

Getting into the settings and doing a bit of tuning, I was reminded that maybe we do not always need a ton new features rather we need to tune our apps to the way they fit into our day. So many features can create a world where we change our usage of an app to match the feature list rather than the other way around. Take a look at the settings of your apps, you might find a way to find more usabilities without adding features.

In the case of Twittelator Pro, I found that along with the normal pre-set group of ‘themes’, you can now customize colors of all of the parts of your twitter friends posts that best match the way you want to see the world.